Oh yeah, thanks
to my lovely girlfriend who lend to me her Canon S100, I managed to play with
this DSLR-ish compact camera during my free timeJ Let’s find out what it is capable
of.
Despite of
having fixed lens, we all know that this little fellow can give the user full
controls of aperture size, shutter speed, ISO, exposure and even manual focus,
making it similar to a professional DSLR.
The first
thing I noticed was its big aperture (F2.0), Bokehlicious!
Portraits
The first
challenge was to do portrait photography with this camera. Oh well, I was alone
at the A Famosa and it was kind of awkward to do it with a stranger. So I was a
little distracted to take the architecture of A Famosa with this camera:
Finally, I’ve
found a good subject for portraits!
I must say that I’m quite impressed by its
high dynamic range! With some optical zoom however, the sky appeared to be over
exposed.
It took me quite some time to get used to its built-in light meter by
the way.
Here is
another portrait I did inside:
and yes, you’re welcome:) 50 cents gone.
I found a
worker sweeping dried leafs on a steep slope that was about 50m away, so I used
the maximum optical zoom to frame him down. The image shown was cropped because
the 5x optical zoom couldn’t even make him fit into 1/3 of the frame. I realized
that image’s sharpness degrades with the maximum zoom. As usual “vintage”
effect was used to fake its quality:p
oh, how about “portrait” for golden horses:)?
Macro shots
Being alone
in the public, I guess it would be too hard for me to do portraits; it’s time
for me to move on to macro shots.
I
used its predefined macro mode to make these shots:
For this one, I got this effect by accident when I was adjusting its color temperature:p
tiny leafs
I would say
that this camera is really good for macro shots! By using the biggest aperture
and bringing the camera close to the subject, you will get interesting shots
from the tiny world.
However,
the macro mode didn’t work well when I need to photograph a subject that was
even smaller. I tried to photograph ants but most of the time its auto-focus in
macro mode didn’t work as desired. Hence, I had to use manual focus mode,
making sure that the subject is properly focused.
Unfortunately,
ants are still too small to be handled by this camera. The photo has to be cropped
quite a bit to direct viewer’s attention to the ants. The process of getting it
focused was such a pain because of the use of F2.0. A small movement of the
ants would blur them out easily. This is the best shot I got so far, I wish it
could be better:(
Landscapes
Alright, it’s
time for some landscape photography.
I’m not too
sure what kind of setting I should use for these high contrast sceneries, so I
used “HDR mode” to capture them. I was able to see the details on the sky and
on the ground. Ironically, I made the entire picture underexposed in order to
make the color of the sky to be more obvious. As a result, we could only see silhouettes,
which is an interesting effect as well.
the pixel dusk:p?
One disadvantage of doing this is that
the noise level will be more obvious in the picture.
More shots taken on the same day:
tilt shift!
Playing with Lights
It's time to play with some lights, artificially
Finally, I tried something different at home, which is light painting. This camera can handle light painting with its slowest shutter speed of 15 seconds, which is enough to draw something with a weak light source:)
Here's what I get:
